Japanese orthography of Ukrainian city names
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[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]
Like many around the world, I have been deeply saddened by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I have been watching news from around the world, including Japan. In addition to the actual war itself, and to the sometimes inane (studio talking-head) coverage of the war as some kind of horse race, I have been disturbed by the Japanese media’s failure to update the orthography of Ukrainian cities such as the capital, Kyiv.
Not a single domestic news outlet I am aware of―including the public broadcaster, NHK―has dropped the Soviet-era Russian name “Kiev” (キエフ) to replace it with Kyiv. CNN’s Japanese site, for instance, has similarly failed to revise its choice of katakana.
Japanese media outlets are not insensitive to changing public opinion and usage. For instance, in a 2015 survey, NHK asked about the broadcast usage of different verbs meaning “to die” for different animals. Formal, standardized Japanese of the type used by public-facing media outlets generally distinguishes sharply between expressions for the death of humans and nonhuman animals. According to the reported results, NHK’s questionnaire respondents largely upheld this division, but there were notable differences between, for instance, the death of “a cat in a park” (feral, one presumes) and a pet cat. If, as the report says, the public broadcaster is concerned that using the verb shinu (死ぬ, a coldly clinical way to say “to die” that is most often used with nonhuman animals) for a popular and charismatic―ergo, at least partly anthropomorphized―zoo animal such as a panda or elephant might offend viewer sensibilities, it doesn’t seem like asking too much to be sensitive to the geopolitical implications of the name of a city of millions under siege by a megalomaniacal tyrant. This is especially true given that there is one prominent Japanese-language news source that has adopted キーウ as the proper orthography for Kyiv. That is the BBC, the broadcaster which NHK emulates more than any other.
Names matter. Not as much as peace and life and the rebuilding of a free and autonomous Ukraine, of course, but they do. I hold out some hope that even amidst the terror and confusion and violence, someone in one of those corner offices in one of those Tokyo high rises is considering this.
Selected readings
- "Taipei 101 and the I ching" (2/27/22)
- "Can't work because of the Ukraine crisis" (2/25/22)
- "Ukrainian is not Russian" (7/26/21)
- "What're Ukraine About?" (3/6/14)
Max said,
March 1, 2022 @ 6:27 pm
Just curiously, what is the katakana for Kyiv? クイブ？ I hope they don't make the same キーブ misinterpretation the US media has.
Dara Connolly said,
March 1, 2022 @ 6:49 pm
Wikipedia says the Ukrainian pronunciation is [kɪjiu̯]
You won't get much closer than キーウ. Japanese phonology doesn't allow for [ji].
AntC said,
March 1, 2022 @ 10:44 pm
In similar vein, how to approach the spelling/pronunciation for the West Ukrainian city Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg/L'vov/etc? This gets mentioned often in news reports, as the gathering centre for foreign nationals trying to escape the fighting.
And can you provide pronunciation advice? Especially for speakers of tonal languages without consonant clusters. Poor Natty here (excellent Thai/English bilingual) is really struggling.
Garrett Wollman said,
March 2, 2022 @ 12:56 am
I think the explanation is probably quite simple: neither the Ukrainian government nor individual Ukrainians have done to Japanese-language sources anything like their concerted hassling of English-language writers and editors.
Akito said,
March 2, 2022 @ 6:01 am
Old habits persist. In English, it probably will be some time before "Ukraine" and "Japan" are changed to "Ukraïna" and "Nihon" (or something similar).
Philip Taylor said,
March 2, 2022 @ 6:27 am
Dara — "Wikipedia says the Ukrainian pronunciation is [kɪjiu̯]". It does indeed, but the (OGG) sound clip to which it links sounds nothing like [kɪjiu̯] to me. What I hear is closer to /ˈkɜː jə/. How would others transcribe that sound clip ?
Akito — « In English, it probably will be some time before "Ukraine" [is] changed to "Ukraïna" ». I have tried adopting "Ukraïna" in conversation with two different Ukrainian friends resident in the UK, but both have replied using the traditional <Br.E> /ju ˈkreɪn/.
languagehat said,
March 2, 2022 @ 7:27 am
"Wikipedia says the Ukrainian pronunciation is [kɪjiu̯]". It does indeed, but the (OGG) sound clip to which it links sounds nothing like [kɪjiu̯] to me. What I hear is closer to /ˈkɜː jə/.
There is no single pronunciation of Ukrainian; there is a wide spectrum from west (where you're more likely to get things like [iu̯]) to east (where pronunciation becomes more Russian-like). Alex Foreman has been very vocal on Facebook about his annoyance with people who complain his Ukrainian sounds "too Russian" — that's how they talk where he's from.
Old habits persist. In English, it probably will be some time before "Ukraine" and "Japan" are changed to "Ukraïna" and "Nihon" (or something similar).
This is nonsense. "Ukraine" and "Japan" are the English words for those places; there is no reason to change them and (fortunately) no likelihood they will ever be changed. This has nothing to do with situations where the actual name of a city is changed (e.g., Leningrad to Petersburg); each language is entitled to its own versions of foreign place names. If you think seriously about the alternative (take a look at a good world atlas), you'll see that way madness lies.
Philip Taylor said,
March 2, 2022 @ 8:49 am
Andrew — « This is nonsense. "Ukraine" and "Japan" are the English words for those places » Would you not agree that this might be better phrased as « This is nonsense. "Ukraine" and "Japan" are the traditional English words for those places » ?
« there is no reason to change them and (fortunately) no likelihood they will ever be changed ». — I think that there is every reason to change them — just because anglophones are, in general, not very adept at identifying how the native pronunciation of a place name differs from their own does not mean that those who are more adept should not seek to inculcate this knowledge in their less aware brethren. I, for example, found it extraordinarily confusing when I booked a flight to Nürnberg and received a ticket to Nuremberg, I had to telephone the airline concerned and ask if they had a mistake, as the last thing I wanted was to end up in a city other than my intended destination.
Philip Taylor said,
March 2, 2022 @ 8:51 am
Sorry, I inexplicable thought that the comment to which I was replying was written by Andrew Usher — my sincere apologies both to Andrew and to Languagehat.
/df said,
March 2, 2022 @ 9:04 am
Agreeing with @languagehat, is the point here that Japanese didn't have its "own version" of the name of the capital of [the] Ukraine, and so the practice is to use a transliteration of some local language version? However Ukrainian and Russian (as in ref [3] of the post, just offshoots of the pure Ruthenian that true patriots should be speaking) are both local languages regardless of politics or gangster imperialism. Just as with English, no doubt the phonemes of Japanese are sufficiently different from those of Ukrainian and Russian that the pronunciation of the transliteration would confuse all local speakers equally.
A1987dM said,
March 2, 2022 @ 9:09 am
@Philip Taylor:
To me it sounds like it could be transcribed as キーユ or rhyme with English "see you"
Bob Ladd said,
March 2, 2022 @ 9:58 am
"Old habits persist" – and so do old issues. The question of place names in different languages has come up on Language Log more than once. At least a dozen years ago (https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=152) both Language Hat and I said the same things we are saying now about it being legitimate for different languages to have their own names for places, just as they have their own words for things. The obvious immorality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine doesn't change that, and criticising other people for what they call the country and its capital doesn't do anything to mitigate the immorality.
Philip Taylor said,
March 2, 2022 @ 10:14 am
A1987dM — with the second syllable of キーユ I would agree, but not with the first — what I hear rhymes best (from my limited set of languages) with French deux or German Goethe.
Terry K. said,
March 2, 2022 @ 10:18 am
If Ukrainians themselves consider Ukraine to be the English Language name of the country, which from what I can tell seems to be the case, then there's no reason to change it to better match Ukrainian.
Pete Tsayolo said,
March 2, 2022 @ 11:06 am
I don't know if languagehat meant to imply this, but I think "'Ukraine' and 'Japan' are the English words for those places" and "each language is entitled to its own versions of foreign place names" apply to the キエフ case, too. Think of キエフ as an established Japanese name of the city, instead of merely an attempt to kana-ize whatever the city is currently called in its current official language(s), or whatever the current majority of its inhabitants currently call it. And even when a Japanese writer does this to names of small Ukrainian towns that can hardly be argued to have an established Japanese form, the writer might still have legitimate reasons for a conscious decision to base kana spellings on the Russian rather than the Ukrainian form. And even if they don't, let's not be bothered by such things.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 2, 2022 @ 11:25 am
This old map showing the territorial provisions of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (by which the new Bolshevik regime in Moscow agreed to respect the independence of the Ukraine before welching on the deal less than a year later — admittedly after the regimes it had concluded the deal with had themselves collapsed) refers to the new nation as "Ukrainia,"* and you can find a scattering of other 19th century and early 20th century English sources doing likewise. That seems parallel to Portuguese/Spanish "Ucrainia" and would have been a perfectly cromulent choice for English but for whatever reasons failed to stick. You can say that the Italian/Romanian "Ucraina" are one omitted vowel closer to the endonym, but who cares about that, especially since -ia is a very standard English suffix for Eastern European nations such as Ruritania, Vulgaria, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk#/media/File:Map_Treaty_Brest-Litovsk.jpg
*This iteration of Ukrainia includes territory currently treated as parts of Belarus and Poland and maybe one gubernia's worth of Russia, while also omitting substantial territory currently claimed by the present Ukrainian government.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 2, 2022 @ 11:38 am
I note that the de facto capital of mainland China is apparently still pronounced as ペキン in Japanese, i.e. "Pekin," like the town in Illinois or the still-current spelling in French. This is further confirmation of the broader phenomenon that languages other than English seem less likely in modern times to change their spellings/pronunciations of foreign toponyms to suit the preferences of the relevant current foreign government, probably because the English spelling/pronunciation is thought of rightly or wrongly as the de facto world standard. The French, in particular, should be insulted and/or embarrassed if they're not the target of the same degree of pressure.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 2, 2022 @ 11:48 am
Finally, it turns out that, at least according to a bullet point in this wikipedia article that perhaps should be viewed skeptically as it has no fewer that four "[citation needed]" notes, the Ukrainians now have their own Cyrillization-of-kana system that I suppose claims to differ from the Russian system in producing output more user-friendly for Ukrainian speakers (or some hypothetical ideal Ukrainian speaker since as noted above there is considerable regional variation in pronunciation). I don't know if this "Kovalenko" system has the capability of being run in reverse, i.e. to generate katakana output from Ukrainian-in-cyrillic input.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillization_of_Japanese
Eugene Volokh said,
March 2, 2022 @ 12:02 pm
I agree with Akito and Language Hat and Bob Ladd (and likely others). I share Prof. Hopson's sympathy for the Ukrainians; I’m a native Russian speaker from Kiev, but it’s clear to me that the Ukrainians are in the right here, and the Russians very much in the wrong. But why should the Japanese rename Kiev to Kyiv? I can’t speak for Japanese, but we English speakers don’t say Moskva, or Rossiya, or (as was pointed out above) Ookraina; we have standard English names for those places, which may well differ from what the residents of the places call them. Ukrainians likewise have their own names for foreign places; what Norwegians call Norge, for instance, is Норвегія.
Now of course if one wants to call it Kyiv (imperfect as that spelling is, given the absence of an English sound corresponding to the first vowel), that’s the speaker's choice. But why is it "disturbing" for Japanese speakers to use the standard Japanese name for a city, just as Ukrainian speakers use the standard Ukrainian name for Japan (Японія)? Why should speakers of a language change their way of speaking that language because of political changes in the place they are discussing?
Carl said,
March 2, 2022 @ 12:14 pm
Insisting that foreign languages attempt to emulate local language pronunciations is silly and doomed to failure. Americans don’t say Paree, Roma, or Köln, not should we. For small Ukrainian cities the public is unlikely to know, sure, use Ukrainian rather than Russian as the guide to transliteration. But there is no purpose in changing well established city name transliterations. It’s an unnecessary gesture of PC that helps no one and can never succeed because languages have incompatible phonologies and their usage shifts historically and independently.
Coby said,
March 2, 2022 @ 12:50 pm
However Kyiv/Kiev is spelled, I pronounce it ['kijɪv], because that was the (Yiddish) pronunciation that I first heard. I also like to refer to L'viv/L'vov/Lwów as Lemberg, not only because that's what it's called in Yiddish but because that's how the name appears in most English-language books that I have read. So what if it's the German form of the name? We also call København by its German name (with an old-fashioned spelling). Just to stick to capitals, we call those of Italy, Czechia and Serbia by their French names, and those of Egypt and Libya by their Italian ones. (Actually Vienna is also French — the change from -e to -a is the same as the one whereby French princesses named Isabelle and Henriette-Marie became English queens named Isabella and Henrietta Maria.)
J.W. Brewer: In Spanish its Ucrania, not Ucrainia.
Sly said,
March 2, 2022 @ 1:01 pm
@Philip Taylor, I sympathise with the confusion, but I don't see how this is problematic or related to anglophones. Isn't that how place names work in all kinds of languages? The languages and culture in use define the name, more than the language and culture present at that place? (Just look at the foreign names for „Deutschland“.) To take your example: In English the place is known as „Nuremberg“ and, e.g., in Italian it is known as „Norimberga“. In return, Germans call the Italian capital „Rom“ and English call it „Rome“, even though its Italian name is „Roma“.
David Marjanović said,
March 2, 2022 @ 1:22 pm
Interesting indeed. The -e is German and perhaps French.
In Twitter videos of the last few days, I've noticed two pronunciations of и. One is the same as і, i.e. [i], except that і triggers palatalization of the preceding consonant while и doesn't (like i vs. y in Czech). The other is like the Polish y: [ɘ] or thereabouts, something I'm much more likely to confuse with [ɛ] than with [ɪ].
In this clip we have a third. I'd say the stressed vowel is [ʚ], the rounded counterpart of [ɜ]. (And yes, the second syllable is definitely just [jə].)
I bet there are others, including the [ɪ] of the Wikipedia transcription. Ukrainian has always been spoken over a huge area that has hardly ever been politically or culturally united.
Andy Stow said,
March 2, 2022 @ 1:26 pm
I can see both sides, but if we are to start pronouncing "Paris" as "Pahree" (even when not being pretentious,) it's only consistent for Americans to also pronounce English place names with the appropriate accent. Imagine how jarring "Birmingham" or "Liverpool" would sound in the middle of an otherwise American accented sentence. Let alone "Hackney."
Philip Taylor said,
March 2, 2022 @ 1:29 pm
Coby — "I also like to refer to L'viv/L'vov/Lwów as Lemberg" — how about Gdańsk : do you like to refer to that as Danzig ? For L'viv/L'vov/Lwów, I personally use the last (Lwów), simply because I speak Polish but not Ukrainian.
Philip Taylor said,
March 2, 2022 @ 1:33 pm
Andy — " it's only consistent for Americans to also pronounce English place names with the appropriate accent" — well, if they'd just stop referring to it as /ˈlaɪ ses tɝ skweər/, that would be a start !
Pete Tsayolo said,
March 2, 2022 @ 2:11 pm
@J.W. Brewer
"the Ukrainians now have their own Cyrillization-of-kana system"
It seems they have since (at least) 1944. This Вікіпедія article presents six different systems.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 2, 2022 @ 3:18 pm
@Pete Tsayolo: Thanks, that's interesting! Although since it sounds like (based on google translate – I can't read Ukrainian) the 1944 version was developed by some presumably anti-Communist Ukrainian emigres who happened to be hanging out in Japan during WW2 I assume it probably had very little influence back in the motherland. I suppose it could still potentially have had influence elsewhere in the Ukrainian diaspora, assuming anyone in that diaspora was actually in the market for a cyrillization-of-Japanese system?
Bloix said,
March 2, 2022 @ 3:35 pm
"Kiev" is not a "Soviet-era" name. It's been the city's name in English (in spelling and presumably pronunciation) for 250 years or so.
Before the mid-1700s, the name in English usually had an "o" in it – Kiow, Kiou, Kiovia, etc. – and the earliest known example in any language – in Hebrew script from a letter written in the 10th century – is unequivocally "Kiyov," so it looks like the "Soviet-era" pronunciation came into widespread use during the 18th century.
The word "Kiev" has become a shibboleth, and if you don't want to be taken for a Putin-supporter you have to write "Kyiv" and say "Keev," or some other bad approximation of the Ukrainian pronunciation that is manageable by ordinary Americans (e.g., people who don't read language log). It's a marker of one's politics, and I would like to be on the right side of the line, so I say Keev now.
The difference between an accurate pronunciation in Ukrainian and in Russian appears to be no more than the difference between words like "pen" and "pin" spoken by people in different parts of the US, and the difference in the spelling in the two languages appears to result primarily from the fact that the Ukrainian and Russian Cyrillic alphabets differ. The introduction of a "y' in the romanized spelling is the result of modern changes in methods of transliteration. It does not indicate a difference in the Russian or Ukrainian spellings or pronunciations.
But so what? The Ukrainians want us to write Kyiv and say something like Keev, and that is what I am going to do.
Still, it would be nice if we could not let our good-faith support of a free Ukraine prevent us from trying to understand the linguistic facts.
Philip Taylor said,
March 2, 2022 @ 5:03 pm
Bloix — for me, it has to be bi-syllabic. /ki:v/, no matter how well motivated, is an abomination. I could handle both /kiː ɪv/ and /kɪ iːv/ but not /ki:v/.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 2, 2022 @ 5:23 pm
Slightly contra Bloix, I would say that "Kiev" became the overwhelmingly dominant English spelling during the Soviet era, as the old alternative spelling "Kieff," with which (per the google n -gram reader) "Kiev" seems to have co-existed in somewhat free variation in English texts during the 19th century (which is not to say there weren't third or even fourth options …) faded away. (Possible exception: the Moussorgsky piece seems to have been called "The Great Gate of Kieff" in some American concert programs at least as recently as the 1950's.)
On the other hand, the steady rise to dominance of the -v alternative seems to have gotten underway shortly after 1900 while the ancien regime was still in power and was obviously part of a much broader general pattern of changing -ff endings to -v endings in the English spellings of all sorts of Russian proper names. I'm not sure what motivated that general pattern of change (the -v alternative seems entirely sensible to me in hindsight but that is in turn just a confession that I don't understand what had motivated the earlier vogue for the -ff alternative) but I don't think it was primarily a desire to curry favor with the Bolsheviks.
But that isn't to say that there may not have been some post-1917 contexts or instances in which deliberately holding to the older -ff spelling of a given name was intended as and/or taken to be a symbolic anti-Bolshevik gesture. At a minimum I suspect that many "White" emigre families did not change the transliteration of their surname that they had started with when they first went into diaspora to get away from the Bolsheviks. Which would then create a contrast with Soviet-era personalities whose surnames had not needed to be transliterated earlier because no one needed to write about them in English. Although I suppose it's not incoherent to treat surnames and toponyms differently.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 2, 2022 @ 5:35 pm
Here are some rather poignant* sentences using now-archaic spellings from, of all places, a 1918 issue of The American Philatelist, which I suppose was naturally interested in how the end of WW1 might change national borders and identities and thus the universe of entities with their own postal authorities:
"In the succeeding centuries Moscow overshadowed Kieff, and still later St. Petersburg gained predominance. But in the heart of every Russian, Kieff has remained the Holy of Holies among Russian cities, and Ukrainia the gayest, most bounteous and romantic of all Russian lands."
*These sentences do presuppose certain things incompatible with the Ukrainian nationalist point of view, which for a variety of reasons did not necessary attract as much sympathy or understanding among Americans 104 years ago as it does today.
AntC said,
March 2, 2022 @ 6:39 pm
" in the heart of every Russian, Kieff has remained the Holy of Holies among Russian cities, …"
Are we to 'cancel' Mussorgsky's [of Saint Petersburg] 1874 piano suite with its movement Проект городских ворот в Киеве. Главный фасад — based on Viktor Hartmann's [also of St Petersburg] "design for city gates at Kiev in the ancient Russian massive style " [wp]. Also the suite has some racist caricatures; an ablist caricature; and a Polish caricature.
But! My Melodia/Vladimir Ashkenazy vinyl of it was purchased in Minsk in the 1970's and brought so carefully to the West.
Bloix said,
March 2, 2022 @ 6:56 pm
JW Brewer –
JW Brewer- you're quite right.
Here's a Kiev, Kyiv, Kieff ngram
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Kiev%2CKieff%2CKyiv%2CKyoff&year_start=1770&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CKiev%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CKieff%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CKyiv%3B%2Cc0
showing that Kiev and Kieff were in roughly equal use until the mid-1890s, when Kiev starts a steady upward trend, while Kieff starts to recede but holds on gamely until WWII. I admit that seems odd to me as I was unfamiliar with the Kieff option.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 2, 2022 @ 7:03 pm
Perhaps Bloix is close enough to my own age as to have first been introduced to Pictures at an Exhibition in the version manhandled by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. By then (1971) the record label had it down as "The Great Gates of Kiev," not "Kieff." With original English lyrics of no great quality added by Greg Lake, which could not be vetoed by anyone claiming to represent the Мусоргский estate since the music was by then in the public domain.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 2, 2022 @ 8:16 pm
Going back to the beginning, the BBC's specific suggestion (back-transliterating the katakana) is that Japanese people should call the Ukrainian capital "kīu" rather than "kiefu." I think many Anglophones as noted above are a bit unsure about how to pronounce "Kyiv" although they can certainly grok that it should sound somehow different from "Kiev" and eliminating anything that sounds like a DRESS vowel is a good way to do that. But (as witness the complaint above about the alleged American solecism of kību), Anglophones are generally not assuming the final "v" is somehow silent or should be realized as a bonus vowel not otherwise suggested by the spelling.
This all reminded me of my long-time candidate (which I have no doubt mentioned in prior comment threads) for the single most ill-advised reromanization of a former Soviet toponym (and ethnonym etc. etc.), namely the switch from "Kirghiz" to "Kyrghyz." As best as I can tell from some very superficial googling, the Japanese may have also managed to sit that one out entirely, sticking to キルギス ("kirugisu") both before and after, perhaps in part because they have the very plausible excuse that the resources of katakana simply do not allow them to differentiate between the old spelling and any new-fangled alternative. The key to that debacle, as I understand it, is that it was an after-shock of a campaign to change the default Cyrillic spelling from Киргиз to Кыргыз. And it is important to note that that was a meaningful change, in the sense that for a Russophone, or native speaker of various other Cyrillic-scripted languages, it conveyed a reasonably accurate direction as to how to change the pronunciation (more or less from the traditional Russian pronunciation to a better approximation of the native one): i.e., stop saying the word with that vowel and use this other vowel instead.
But having accomplished that change, someone in authority then thought that the Latin-alphabet spelling should likewise change and that it should change by mechanically applying some existing romanization-of-Cyrillic convention to the change in the Cyrillic spelling. But if there's a Latin-scripted language in which changing the "vowel letters" in K*rgh*z from i's to y's provides any sort of coherent direction as to how to change the pronunciation, English ain't it, and I'm not sure what is. The underexamined assumption that a meaningful change in Cyrillic spelling ought to naturally flow through to a change in romanization without actually thinking through whether it would still be meaningful after it flowed through was the key conceptual mistake, and there is perhaps a broader moral-of-the-story to be drawn from that.
Terpomo said,
March 2, 2022 @ 8:41 pm
J. W. Brewer, your comment reminds me of these comments from a recent Reddit thread on the 'Türkiye' situation:
>>so it makes less and less sense for us to insist on Anglicizing every name.
>This has the inverse of making English a "neutral" or universal language, which is in itself hardly an unproblematic assumption. We can consider the merits of a given endonym vs. exonym, but ease of pronunciation ("Turkey" is almost as close as you can get to a native English pronunciation of Türkiye anyway!), historical continuity, and acknowledging our own historical-linguistic specificity are merits to exonyms that we shouldn't forget at the drop of a hat.
>We don't insist that every non-Anglophone country call England /ɪŋglənd/, and I think we should reflect on why that is, in case it might have some subtler but no less pernicious notions of privileged universality.
And:
>They aren’t changing the country’s English name because last time I checked they have no control over the English language. English speakers have called it and its predecessors Turkey for centuries. Similarly, the UK hasn’t demanded and can’t demand that France called them ‘l’United Kingdom’ rather than ‘le Royaume-Uni’ (hell they go with Grande-Bretagne or even Angleterre more often), and so it goes.
>Similarly, Turks call England Ingiltere (dot on first I). “How dare they!”
>They can get the name changed in some official contexts like the UN, that’s it.
>I very much doubt English speakers will suddenly adopt the umlaut, either.
>But this presumption does seem to be one indication that it’s forgotten that English is itself a language with a speech community (in fact several), and one without central ‘language authorities’, rather than some ISO-style international communication standard that even non-English speaking countries can make official proclamations on. But I doubt Erdogan can grasp that.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 2, 2022 @ 9:21 pm
@Terpomo: But why should Anglophones care what foreigners call England? I mean, I guess the minority of them that are English by nationality or residence might theoretically care, but why should normal Americans or even Australians care even in theory? (Spoiler: the current geopolitical or economic significance of England-as-such is not the primary reason why English has, perhaps problematically, stumbled into being a "'neutral' or universal language.")
Terpomo said,
March 2, 2022 @ 10:41 pm
The same concept works mutatis mutandis for America- nobody in America cares that the Chinese call it Měiguó.
VVOV said,
March 3, 2022 @ 12:09 am
Wading reluctantly into this discussion: I think Bloix more or less nails it by describing Kyiv/Kiev as a "shibboleth", with each spelling signaling support/solidarity toward Ukraine or Russia, respectively.
English is the lingua franca of many discussions among key parties (U.N. members, NATO members, etc) who have the desire and ability to influence the war in Ukraine. Japanese lacks this same status – outside of Japan, nobody is going to meet and debate economic sanctions against Russia, military aid to Ukraine, etc in Japanese.
I think it follows that English speakers' choice of how to say/pronounce Kyiv/Kiev "matters" (to Ukrainians) in a way that Japanese speakers' does not. The privileged, near-unique status of English as a global lingua franca has the consequence that the stakeholders of English usage are more than just English native speakers.
Victor Mair said,
March 3, 2022 @ 12:32 am
But the PRC will not let us call the capital of their country Peking or the like, which we had been doing for three centuries and more. They insist that we call it Beijing (or Beizhing).
Michael Watts said,
March 3, 2022 @ 12:58 am
The motivation is straightforward: that's how Russian is pronounced. Word-final consonants are devoiced. The -v spelling in English is a choice to mirror Russian spelling (with -в) at the cost of completely ignoring the pronunciation. It assumes that the proper audience for a written English word is people who would like to know how the word is spelled in Russian, rather than people who would like to know how it's pronounced.
Philip Taylor said,
March 3, 2022 @ 2:49 am
Ant — "Are we to 'cancel' Mussorgsky's 1874 piano suite with its movement Проект городских ворот в Киеве. Главный фасад — based on Viktor Hartmann's [also of St Petersburg] "design for city gates at Kiev in the ancient Russian massive style " [wp]. Also the suite has some racist caricatures; an ablist caricature; and a Polish caricature" — here I am clearly demonstrating my ignorance, but I cannot see how a piano suite (which, I think by definition, has no accompanying lyrics) can "[have] some racist caricatures; an ablist caricature; and a Polish caricature" — how can something purely instrumental, no matter how intricate, convey anything racist (or anything-ist) at all ?
David Marjanović said,
March 3, 2022 @ 5:49 am
That's the Polish form, Kijów.
AntC said,
March 3, 2022 @ 6:18 am
My 'cancel' was in scare quotes. Of course I want artists to be able to caricature.
@Philip look at Stasov's descriptions of the movements, and reflect these are musical evocations of visual caricatures (q.v.) — so not "purely instrumental".
Yes you are demonstrating your lack of imagination. See also 'Program Music'. Since we've got to St Petersburg, consider Shostakovich and irony in "purely instrumental" music, or the Piano Trio No. 2 allegro con brio "frenzied dance" or even more tortured Allegretto ("Jewish-style melody"). Consider even Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, with its rustic merrymaking (an indulgent caricature). Or 'Till Eulenspiegel' (tone poem).
AntC said,
March 3, 2022 @ 6:34 am
(I can never figure out whether Philip Taylor's persona here is a deliberate caricature of an old fart, or that's what he's like in person, and is entirely self-unaware.)
Philip Taylor said,
March 3, 2022 @ 7:06 am
Probably self-unaware — I have no interest whatsoever in attempting to caricature an old fart, or even a young fart for that matter. As for "musical evocations of visual caricatures", I put this in the same category as the Emperor's new clothes
Victor Mair said,
March 3, 2022 @ 7:10 am
For all the years we've been on Language Log, Philip Taylor has been a consistent character, not a caricature. One might not agree with many of his positions, but he is surprisingly knowledgeable, is very good at phonological description, and is an earnest, diligent person. All in all, we benefit from his presence among us.
John Swindle said,
March 3, 2022 @ 7:55 am
This has been covered here before, but did the PRC really force English speakers worldwide to write and try to say "Beijing" instead of "Peking"? How did they do that? As I recall, prominent propaganda organs Radio Peking and Peking Review only became Radio Beijing and Beijing Review after it became clear that the English-speaking world had adopted "Beijing."
Ivory Coast, on the other hand, may or may not have cruelly forced us to attempt "Côte d'Ivoire."
I predict (1) that the names of foreign persons and places in every language will remain inconsistent; and, somewhat less confidently, (2) that the names of foreign persons and places will not in themselves threaten the existence of any language great or small, and particularly not English. There's political hay to be made, though.
languagehat said,
March 3, 2022 @ 8:56 am
Although I suppose it's not incoherent to treat surnames and toponyms differently.
Replace "not incoherent" by "essential." I've never understood why so many people seem to think the same rules apply to both (because they're both written with a capital letter?); they are utterly different. To take the most salient point: a toponym refers to a physical entity that has no mind of its own, no ability to like or dislike a spelling, and can last for thousands of years under essentially the same name (e.g., Jericho). A surname is the attribute of a particular person (not a family — different members of the same family can and do spell and pronounce their surname differently), and that person has every right to insist that people use the version they prefer. You can, of course, choose to do differently, just as you can choose to speak insultingly to the person, but there is a clear right and wrong here. (The issue of what to do with foreign names that are hard to pronounce in your language is a separate and difficult one; everybody has different degrees of adaptability to foreign phonology.)
English-speakers who get huffy about other English-speakers saying or writing "Peking" and "Bombay" rather than "Beijing" and "Mumbai" are ignoring both that these names have been imposed by governments which have no sway over us (and no ethical claim to our following their dictates) and, in the second case, that a great many residents of the city prefer to call it Bombay (similarly for Calcutta and other places renamed for the usual absurd nationalist reasons).
As for Kiev/Kyiv, I agree that it has become a shibboleth, but like Philip Taylor I find /ki:v/ an abomination and will never say it. The traditional English pronunciation works perfectly well even if you write Kyiv.
languagehat said,
March 3, 2022 @ 10:01 am
Oops, I just realized that "that person has every right to insist that people use the version they prefer" is appallingly ambiguous: I meant, of course, "the version that person prefers"!
Jonathan Smith said,
March 3, 2022 @ 10:03 am
Language communities are a function of shared conventions, and re: toponyms and other, established conventions can shift as new consensus forms — the larger context re: English being, as VVOV says, that the relevant community is in fact international. So Peking > Beijing etc. are internationally-influenced shifts in English orthographical convention; for the emergence of this one in particular see e.g. the NYT editorial notes of March '79 and November '86:
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/03/04/archives/times-revises-style-of-chinese-spelling-under-new-system-teng.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/26/nyregion/editors-note-702886.html
I can't see the point in grousing about such conventions by reference to personal or putative objective value — the value is in the conventionality.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 3, 2022 @ 11:11 am
I don't suppose the Japanese are as much influenced by Rangaku ("Dutch learning") these days as in former centuries, but the Kiev->Kyiv shibboleth has finally reached one of the leading (3d largest in circulation, sez wikipedia) Dutch newspapers, which is now switching its house style rather later than the English-language "buitenlandse media" it cites as precedents. Interestingly enough, it had already been using Lviv in preference to Lvov (but apparently had no regard for the lost glories of Lwow or Lemberg).
https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/de-volkskrant-hanteert-voortaan-oekraiense-namen-van-steden-kiev-wordt-kyiv~b5a04fc8/
VVOV said,
March 3, 2022 @ 11:28 am
@ Jonathan Smith: thank you, "the relevant [speech] community is in fact international" is a much more succinct way of putting what I was trying to say!
Some data to add to the discussion: in contrast to the English corpus link showing that "Kyiv" has been in use since mid 1990s, here's google trends for キーウ, essentially zero search volume before the past 2 weeks: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=JP&q=%E3%82%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A6
Terry K. said,
March 3, 2022 @ 11:33 am
I don't know how this plays into writing Kyiv in Japanese, but it strikes me that there's a distinction between transliterating into a writing system, verses transliterating into another language in written form. If one were devising a system of writing Mandarin words used in English (versus in writing Mandarin Roman characters), one would do some things different from Pinyin.
And if one were trying to write an English language approximation of [ˈkɪjiu̯], it probably wouldn't come out Kyiv.
languagehat said,
March 3, 2022 @ 12:04 pm
I can't see the point in grousing about such conventions by reference to personal or putative objective value — the value is in the conventionality.
So everyone should shut up and follow the mandates? Sorry, not gonna happen.
Alexander Browne said,
March 3, 2022 @ 12:26 pm
+1 to Michael Watts's
And interestingly, Ukrainian is one of the few Slavic languages that doesn't have word-final devoicing. (IIRC the other is standard Serbo-Croatian – or BCMS or whatever you want to call it.)
Alexander Browne said,
March 3, 2022 @ 12:38 pm
That also made me think: Yiddish, unlike most Germanic languages besides English, also doesn't have final devoicing. I wonder if the influence of Yiddish speakers with a pronunciation ending in -v (as Coby mentioned above) helped with the change from the English version ending in -ff to -v.
Bloix said,
March 3, 2022 @ 12:57 pm
JW Brewer-
(marginally relevant old person reminiscence follows):
When I was a lad, our family used to sit around the TV to watch Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts – my parents were huge Bernstein devotees – and I'm very sure that I first heard the Mussorgsky (in the Ravel orchestration) on one of those shows. The Great Gate, with its clanging bells, blaring trumpets, and triumphal climax – all presided over by that compelling presence at his most theatrical – is still an important musical recollection for me.
The performance I saw is certainly this one, from 1966 -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgKmuE4tbD4
It's not labelled as an excerpt from one of the Young People's Concerts, but look at the audience at minute 2:09, and other sources show that there was a YPC program from 1966 that featured Pictures at an Exhibition.
The relevance of this is that at the beginning of the clip, the movement or section is labelled on-screen (as they always were) -and the name given is The Great Gate of Kiev.
Vampyricon said,
March 3, 2022 @ 3:23 pm
Seconding what Garrett Wollman said. There was a campaign in 2018 or 2019 to get English-language media to switch to Kyiv. The argument on Wikipedia was enshrined in Lamest Edit Wars. The Japanese, I assume, weren't similarly pressured.
Philip Anderson said,
March 3, 2022 @ 3:24 pm
While I am a supporter of languages having their own variants of names for foreign places, it’s also important to acknowledge when the source name is changed (as distinct from develops), such as Madras -> Chenai (and the conservatism of some locals is not an excuse). But a madras curry can stay, since AFAIK it’s not a n Indian dish.
Carl said,
March 3, 2022 @ 3:34 pm
Name changes of Indian cities are the exception that prove the rule because English is spoken as a native language in India. We should respect those name changes as much (or as little) as the name change of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, since they are in the Anglosphere. It is quite different from a group of non-English natives insisting on an English name change for ideological reasons.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 3, 2022 @ 3:41 pm
Perhaps we will need a new shibboleth after this is done. I am intrigued to be informed by wikipedia that the seaport still conventionally known as Odessa in English and Оде́сса in Russian is spelled Оде́са in Ukrainian, creating a possible argument for romanized "Odesa."
Or a switch in Japanese from オデッサ to オデサ.
I can't say I understand why the Ukrainian spelling is what it is although that may quite likely just be an artifact of my own ignorance. It's not an East-Slavic-origin word at all but a Czarist riff on the ancient Greek Black Sea town of Odessos/Ὀδησσός.* Is Ukrainian more hostile than Russian to doubled letters that are there for largely etymological reasons? Would a hypothetical 18th-century Ukrainian-speaking regime coining a name based on the same classical precedent have spelled its coinage differently than the Russophone regime did?
*The historical Ὀδησσός was located quite a ways down the coast in what is now Bulgaria, but perhaps whoever was advising Catherine the Great on classically-inspired toponyms was not working with a very good map.
Philip Anderson said,
March 3, 2022 @ 3:55 pm
Regarding “England” in other languages, equivalent names, often translations, are not an issue in Britain. But confusion between England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom is more problematic, especially to the Welsh, Scots and Irish – more so if the offender is English!
I know other countries who encountered England first tended to keep the name for the successor state, like using Russia for the USSR, but it’s a little rude.
Coby said,
March 3, 2022 @ 4:58 pm
J.W. Brewer: Одесса isn't the only -cc- in Russian that corresponds to a simple -c- in Ukrainian; so is Россия vs. Росія, and a good many Latin-derived common words as well: диссертация vs. дисертація etc.
I can't think of any reason to drop the -ss- in the English form of the name, if only to keep something close to the original pronunciation.
Philip Taylor said,
March 3, 2022 @ 5:10 pm
"But a madras curry can stay, since AFAIK it’s not an Indian dish" — too late in the evening to consult any of my myriad (authentic) Indian cookery books to check on the validity of that assertion (tho' I would be willing to bet that a chicken Madras is a darned sight more authentic than a chicken tikka masala !) but what about the case of Pekin[g] duck ? That most definitely is an authentic Chinese dish, so would you have it renamed as Beijing duck ?
Jonathan Smith said,
March 3, 2022 @ 6:37 pm
@languagehat
Aha I see you have some early writings on this topic, wherein it seems to me you don't deny the possibility that consensus changes to conventions of this kind, while often annoying and even objectively bad in certain respects, might nonetheless serve a common good (communication); the concern is rather with acquiescence to perceived foreign "diktat" in particular cases. I would say re: China — given the shift in the U.S. press towards PRC-style Romanization (early 1979), this following on spelling standardization policies in the PRC as announced in the first Beijing Review so titled (Jan. 5 1979; source for NYT's pronunciation guide above), this following on normalization of relations between the U.S. and China as announced late 1978 — that your bigger question is why the U.S. would abscond from de facto independent Taiwan precisely as it grew increasingly free and democratic :D (meaning the real answer is I suppose something like "global capitalism", which would allow us to circle back to Ukraine… but I have noticed lately that linguists are more skeptical of Chomskyan attitudes on international politics than I had imagined.)
Michael Watts said,
March 3, 2022 @ 7:43 pm
I think the "authenticist" approach to this question is to rename the dish Beijing Kaoya. [北京烤鸭 – "beijing baked duck"]
Josh R. said,
March 3, 2022 @ 9:22 pm
Philip Taylor said,
"well, if they'd just stop referring to it as /ˈlaɪ ses tɝ skweər/, that would be a start !"
I'll start taking notes from Britons on place names when they start properly pronouncing "Los Angeles."
John Swindle said,
March 4, 2022 @ 2:17 am
@Jonathan Smith: Thanks for the timeline on Beijing Review.
Michael Watts said,
March 4, 2022 @ 4:43 am
How do Britons pronounce Los Angeles?
Thomas Rees said,
March 4, 2022 @ 5:10 am
Josh R. said,
"I'll start taking notes from Britons on place names when they start properly pronouncing 'Los Angeles’."
I'll start taking notes from Josh Reyer on place names when he starts properly spelling "Los Ángeles.” There is no one proper English pronunciation; it’s all over the place.
Philip Taylor said,
March 4, 2022 @ 5:38 am
Personally speaking, I would prefer any variation on /lɒs ˈæn dʒe liːz/ to the almost universal /ˌel ˈeɪ/.
Philip Taylor said,
March 4, 2022 @ 6:41 am
Comin back to Pekin[g] duck, if Michael would like authenticists to refer to it as Běijīng kǎoyā, then I assume that he would also propose that we start referring to Chicken Kiev as Kuryatyna Kyyiv / Курятина Київ … (apologies for any errors in declensions, etc — I speak no Ukrainian).
Michael Watts said,
March 4, 2022 @ 7:12 am
There's only one American pronunciation. We say /lɑs ˈæn dʒə ləs/.
I'm having difficulty seeing why pronouncing "LA" as /ɛl.eɪ/ is supposed to cause problems for anyone.
The name of Los Angeles always gives me trouble in Mandarin, because it's 洛杉矶 luo-shan-ji. I assume this name was originally chosen by someone who didn't speak Mandarin. But it bothers me every time.
I wouldn't. I claimed that that was the authenticist approach, not that the authenticist approach was a good idea.
Philip Taylor said,
March 4, 2022 @ 7:25 am
Unless your "We" is the royal "We", Michael, I really have difficulty in believing that statement, despite the fact that I am certain that you have considerably more experience (and expertise) in this matter than do I.
Andrew Usher said,
March 4, 2022 @ 7:44 am
Josh R.'s point is that /li:z/ is wrong in the same sense that /ˈlaɪ,sɛstɝ/ is – an incorrect guess from the spelling. Americans don't say it that way (anymore). It's /lɪs/ – that is what the city officially adopted in the 1950s, and now almost everyone in the US conforms to it. The biggest competitor to that pronunciation (locally) was not /ˈændʒəliːz/ but /ˈæŋgəlɪs/ although that's equally un-Spanish. Obviously we're not going to like Brits lecturing us on saying their place-names correctly when they deliberately mangle ours – and this is not the only one; we recently had 'Maryland' brought up where English people apparently can't bring themselves the reduce the second and third vowels (as all Americans do) though their own names are full of such reductions.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
Terry K. said,
March 4, 2022 @ 8:03 am
@Philip Taylor
Well, Michael Watts does make the error of forgetting the English isn't the only language spoken in the L.A. area, and that pronouncing Los Angeles in Spanish when speaking Spanish would be totally normal (and still an American pronunciation). And I suspect Spanish Speakers might do that sometimes even when speaking English.
Other than that, he's pretty close to correct. Those without the cot-caught merger would say /lɔs ˈændʒələs/. There may be some dated pronunciations still floating around, but, if so, those would be non-standard.
languagehat said,
March 4, 2022 @ 9:50 am
Well, Michael Watts does make the error of forgetting the English isn't the only language spoken in the L.A. area, and that pronouncing Los Angeles in Spanish when speaking Spanish would be totally normal (and still an American pronunciation).
Man, I hate this kind of disingenuous, pointless "gotcha." Michael Watts was clearly talking about English, and you know that perfectly well. And if you want to play that game, there are also lots of speakers of Korean, Filipino, Armenian, Persian, and various varieties of Chinese (to name only a few) in the L.A. area, and their ways of pronouncing Los Angeles are also totally normal (and still American pronunciations). Gotcha!
Terry K. said,
March 4, 2022 @ 10:37 am
It's not a game of "gotcha". Since "Los Angeles" is a Spanish word (with definite article) and the full name of the city a Spanish phrase, the Spanish language is particular relevant, and it's insulting to Spanish speakers to call the English language pronunciation the only American pronunciation. And, as I said, there are probably people who use the Spanish pronunciation at times when speaking English, so my comments were relevant to pronunciation when speaking English. Whereas other languages spoken in LA aren't relevant to pronunciation in English.
Alexander Browne said,
March 4, 2022 @ 10:47 am
An acquaintance, who grew up in the midwest US with that region's standard (rhotic) accent, came back from living in Australia pronouncing Melbourne as /ˈmɛl.bən/.
Re British "Maryland": when I hear it as "Mary Land" on the BBC I find it striking, since it's not like the UK pronunciation of e.g. "Cumberland" has unreduced "lænd", as well as all sorts of other place names like those ending in "-bury" pronounced /bɹɪ/.
Alexander Browne said,
March 4, 2022 @ 11:15 am
I only report the news:
— BBC World News
VVOV said,
March 4, 2022 @ 11:39 am
As an American with bilingual Spanish-English friends and family members who live in Southern California, I can attest that /los ˈanxeles/ definitely gets used in English speech.
Regarding "Chicken Kiev", Mussorgsky's "Great Gate of Kiev" etc., I think it's a pretty well recognized linguistic process for older forms of a word to stay "fossilized" in names / set phrases / titles / idioms etc. See "Peking Duck", "Peking University", "Kwansei Gakuin University", and otherwise-obsolete English words like the "sleight" in "sleight of hand".
Bob Ladd said,
March 4, 2022 @ 1:11 pm
Since we've reached the point in the comment thread of airing pet peeves about UK pronunciations of US place names like Los Angeleez and Mary Land, let me add VERmont and Hooston. (Maybe the last one is not so common any more, because of the familiarity of the phrase "Houston, we have a problem", but I definitely hear it from time to time.)
Philip Taylor said,
March 4, 2022 @ 2:55 pm
Leaving aside our (British) mangling of "Los Ángeles" and your (American) mangling of "Leicester Square" and returning to /ki:v/, I must now challenge my own assertion that /ki:v/ is an abomination and that Ky[y]iv must be bi-syllabic.
Listen, please, to the BBC radio programme Letter from Ukraine, Episode 1 of 3, in which Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov reflects on the tumultuous events of the last few days and his family's flight from their home in Kyiv. Between 00:59 and 01:00 you will hear Andrey say the first of several instances of Kyiv; I for one have great difficulty in hearing anything other than /ki:v/. It is most certainly not bi-syllabic, and is at most 1.5-syllabic. What do others hear and what do they think ?
Alexander Browne said,
March 4, 2022 @ 3:07 pm
Philip Taylor: Sadly that link leads me to a page with the message that the "content is not currently available on this device". It doesn't say, but I suspect it's geofenced to be UK-only.
Also, for what it's worth, I noticed that Wikipedia says Andrey Kurkov writes in Russian.
Philip Taylor said,
March 4, 2022 @ 3:56 pm
Ah, sorry about that — I received the same message when I tried to listen using Seamonkey, but Firefox was able to handle it OK. Anyhow, I have extracted "two more rockets fell on Kyiv" and saved it here.
As to Andrey Kurkov, I note that he born on 23rd April 1961 in Leningrad, and now lives in Kyiv (or did, prior to the Russian invasion). How reliable his pronunciation of Kyiv is is therefore arguably moot.
Alexander Browne said,
March 4, 2022 @ 5:07 pm
Philip Taylor: I do agree, that sounds like the same /ki:v/ that I normally hear from NPR reporters (their instructions being "KYIV is Ukrainian. Kiev is Russian. We should use Kyiv. It's like KEE-eev. But if you say KEEV that is fine.")
Michael Watts said,
March 4, 2022 @ 8:26 pm
On the topic of word-final /iz/ versus /əs/, I notice that the pronunciation I learned for "diabetes" is /daɪ.ə.bi.ɾiz/, but current pronunciation seems to have shifted to /daɪ.ə.bi.ɾəs/.
After some thought, I see no real way to distinguish a notionally unstressed /ɪ/ from /ə/. Is KIT even considered a vowel that can appear in unstressed syllables?
If we're so concerned with using the Ukrainian name rather than the English name of the city, should we be concerned that there is no [v] sound in the Ukrainian name? Why is KEEV supposed to be fine? Ending with a consonant seems to be a surer sign of Russian imperialism than whatever vowels you might use. (Russian ([ˈkʲi(ɪ̯)ɪf]) and Ukrainian ([ˈkɪjiu̯]) pronunciations taken from Russian and Ukrainian wiktionary, respectively.)
Philip Taylor said,
March 5, 2022 @ 4:18 am
I don't believe that we are "concerned with using the Ukrainian name rather than the English name of the city", Michael — we are, I believe, concerned with using the Ukrainian name rather than the Russian name. My concern was that some radio announcers (I don't watch television, so have no idea whether the same situation obtains there) appeared to be using a single syllable where I believed that two syllables were required, but having heard a ?native? Ukrainian speaker say /ki:v/ several times I was forced to revise my position and query whether, in fact, monosyllabic /ki:v/ was a valid variant. However, we know that Andrey was not reading his original text — the BBC web site credits the translator — so is it possible that even a native Ukrainian speaker, reading a text written in English, might pronounce the name of his home city using what he believed was the correct English pronunciation rather then the correct Ukrainian ? After some thought, I believe that he might well do so — I am reasonably certain that I have heard native French speakers refer to /ˈpær ɪs/ rather than /pa ˈʁi/ when speaking in English.
Michael Watts said,
March 5, 2022 @ 5:32 am
But this position is totally incoherent. We weren't using the Russian name before any more than we're using the Ukrainian name now. It isn't possible to use a Russian or Ukrainian word in English since, as Carl pointed out, different languages have incompatible phonologies.
Well, yes, of course. I'm not about to read 旧金山 as /sæn.fɹæn.sɪs.koʊ/. And while I might read 洛杉矶 as if it said 洛三矶, that would just be an error on my part — I certainly wouldn't read it as if it said "Los Angeles".
Philip Taylor said,
March 5, 2022 @ 5:45 am
What exactly do you mean by incompatible phonologies, Michael ? Are you suggesting that a fluent speaker of two languages having putatively "incompatible" phonologies could not successfully embed an L1 word in an otherwise L2 utterance ?
Terry K. said,
March 5, 2022 @ 8:47 am
My take on It isn't possible to use a Russian or Ukrainian word in English… is that it isn't possible to use a foreign word in English without either accent shifting to pronounce it in the original language, or adjusting the pronunciation to English.
How strongly that's true will depend on the language and the word.
Andrew Usher said,
March 5, 2022 @ 8:48 am
Of course it is possible. But is it not always done, and switching between phonological systems mid-sentence is unnatural for many, even if bilingual. In any case the pronunciation of the city is an English issue and the people affected overwhelmingly don't speak Russian or Ukrainian and are not going to make any attempt to use their phonology – we never said 'Kiev' in a more Russian way than English phonology permits, and realistically we won't for 'Kyiv' and Ukrainian, either. That's why KEEV is generally considered acceptable; it may be the closest English phonology will easily get, and it serves the purpose of the shibboleth in indicating that you are not using the 'Russian' form.
Michael Watts:
I have to say you're wrong about 'diabetes'. There may be some regional variation, but the /iz/ variant is definitely considered standard and the /əs/ sometimes wrong – look up 'diabeetus' to see that.
KIT is certainly considered a vowel that can appear is unstressed syllables and is used as such in British transcription. Americans usually don't distinguish (weak vowel merger), so my writing the last syllable of Los Angeles as /lɪs/ was not meant to indicate a different version from /ləs/ nor that the former is more correct.
Michael Watts said,
March 5, 2022 @ 7:54 pm
But it seems clear that that isn't true. /kju/, /ki.(j)u/ or even /keɪ.(j)u/ are all perfectly compatible with English phonology and they're all much closer to the Ukrainian form than /kiv/ is. (I tend to agree with Philip Taylor that the first syllable of wikimedia's recording would be best rendered in English as /kɜː/. But I don't think English phonology will really permit /kɜː.ju/.)
Jongseong Park said,
March 6, 2022 @ 12:30 am
Meanwhile in South Korea, most major news organizations switched from Russian-based 키예프 Kiyepeu to Ukrainian-based 키이우 Kiiu virtually overnight around Wednesday, 2 March.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Korea posted a message on Facebook on 1 March asking Koreans to use Ukrainian names for the places in Ukraine, making direct reference to the 1919 Independence Movement in Korea which is celebrated on 1 March. This evidently pushed the right buttons.
Even before that, there were some voices being raised about changing the name, probably as more people started noticing the change from Kiev to Kyiv in the English-language media. On 28 February, someone suggested in the internal message board of the national broadcaster KBS that that they should use the Ukrainian name for Kyiv.
The transcription of foreign names are regulated by the National Institute of the Korean Language (NIKL) in South Korea, so they checked with them for recommendation on the transcription to use. The transcription suggested internally at KBS was 키이우 Kiiu, but the Ukrainian Embassy actually suggested 크이우 Keuiu instead. There were others who were writing 키이브 Kiibeu based on interpreting the last consonant of Kyiv as [v].
The NIKL responded that it should be 키이우 Kiiu based on the internal guidelines they had been following for Ukrainian names. Ukrainian и is roughly equivalent to Russian ы (they are both romanized as y) and to Polish y, so it's somewhere between 으 eu [ɯ] and 이 i [i]. However, Russian ы and Polish y are both written 이 i in Korean according to existing rules, so to be consistent they also went with 이 i for the first vowel of the name.
With the blessing of the NIKL, most major news outlets started using 키이우 Kiiu almost immediately, even though the NIKL merely approved the Ukrainian-based name in addition to the existing Russian-based name and never said that the existing name should no longer be used. It was a stunning overnight change, the like of which I struggle to recall in all my days of following how foreign names were transcribed in Korean.
The reaction to the change from Koreans that I've seen is almost unanimously positive. The only opinion I've seen which fell short of full endorsement of the change came from a respected translator and language commentator. He said that it is fine to use the Ukrainian name, but also pointed out that using the Russian name does not mean endorsing Russia's claim to the city; lots of place names we use are different from the endonyms, and we don't think of them as problematic because the exonyms have their own history and reasons for being used in the Korean language.
RP said,
March 7, 2022 @ 3:11 pm
There's one thing I've not quite been able to understand.
Russian is the native language of almost a third of Ukrainians. Given that Ukraine's government strongly denies that it any way whatsoever disrespects or discriminates against the Russian speakers, why has it adopted the seemingly virulently nationalistic position of demanding that English speakers adopt the unfamiliar spelling "Kyiv", merely because "Kiev" is closer to the Russian form?
Pete Tsayolo said,
March 7, 2022 @ 4:06 pm
@David Marjanović:
[About "Ukraine":] "The -e is German and perhaps French."
But where does the German -e come from? Wiktionary says Yiddish has variants without and with -e, so could it be a direct transmission from Yiddish to German? Or was "Ukraine" modeled on other correspondences of foreign "-a" / German "-e"?
Jongseong Park said,
March 8, 2022 @ 2:07 am
@RP: Governments requesting their preferred form of the names of cities or countries to be used in English, whether Beijing or Côte d'Ivoire or Eswatini or Kolkata, can't be automatically labelled "virulently nationalistic". There is of course a lot of symbolic meaning in how we choose to name places, but there are several motivations at play, much of which can be bureaucratic and/or in the domain we think of as branding.
In 2008, the Belarusian Embassy in Korea requested the Korean name for Belarus be changed from 벨로루시 Bellorusi (based on the older Russian variant Белорусь as opposed to today's Беларусь or Белоруссия) to 벨라루스 Bellaruseu, so we accepted. Now the Belarusian government at the time (or even now) could hardly be accused of being "virulently nationalistic", with Russian being the dominant language and Belarusian speakers continuing to be discriminated against.
I was in Kharkiv in 2004 on a research trip and had a lengthy interview in English with an ethnic Korean resident. Later when I emailed her I referred to the city as "Kharkov", the Russian name, in recognition of the fact that Kharkiv is a Russian-speaking city, and ethnic Koreans are mostly Russian speakers. However, she corrected me that the city is called "Kharkiv". So it would be wrong to assume that Russian speakers would automatically be against using the Ukrainian forms as the primary names of places in Ukraine.
Outsiders seem to confuse the language issue in Ukraine a lot (perhaps Putin most of all), but being Russian speakers in Ukraine does not mean hostility to Ukrainian as the official language, no more than English speakers in Ireland are against the Irish language. In 2004, I heard mostly Russian all the time in Kyiv, and the media landscape was dominated by the Russian language. Even recently, the motivation for some of the measures introduced to protect the standing of Ukrainian was the complaint that there was more content in Russian on television than in Ukrainian.
Andrew Usher said,
March 8, 2022 @ 8:22 am
Is that Korean something like /ki.u/ ? I think that is reasonable for what we're discussing. I assume the original basis for /kiv/ (which I will use when necessary, because I care more about being understood than faithfulness to the original) was that Ukrainians often/usually compress it to one syllable in speech. And English does not like final glides, so translating it to the familiar /v/ is an easy step.
Ireland is a bad comparison as the Irish language's status as official is very much nominal.
languagehat said,
March 8, 2022 @ 8:33 am
Since "Los Angeles" is a Spanish word (with definite article) and the full name of the city a Spanish phrase, the Spanish language is particular relevant, and it's insulting to Spanish speakers to call the English language pronunciation the only American pronunciation.
Since "Detroit" is a French word and the name was given by Frenchmen, the French language is particularly relevant, and it's insulting to French speakers to call the English language pronunciation the only American pronunciation.
If we're so concerned with using the Ukrainian name rather than the English name of the city, should we be concerned that there is no [v] sound in the Ukrainian name?
I guess I have to repeat what I said on Mar. 2: There is no single pronunciation of Ukrainian; there is a wide spectrum from west (where you're more likely to get things like [iu̯]) to east (where pronunciation becomes more Russian-like). There is a [v] sound in the Ukrainian name if that's how you pronounce your native Ukrainian. Let's please not succumb to non-fact-based hypernationalism about a nation that is not even ours (assuming you're not Ukrainian).
Outsiders seem to confuse the language issue in Ukraine a lot (perhaps Putin most of all), but being Russian speakers in Ukraine does not mean hostility to Ukrainian as the official language, no more than English speakers in Ireland are against the Irish language. In 2004, I heard mostly Russian all the time in Kyiv, and the media landscape was dominated by the Russian language.
Thank you! Nice to see a breath of fact-based good sense in this thread.
Terry K. said,
March 8, 2022 @ 8:54 am
@Languagehat.
Wow. You are missing a BIG point that I explicitly stated. Spanish is a language currently spoken in Los Angeles? Is that true of French in Detroit? If not, your comparison falls apart, since it misses a key point, namely the existed of the people it allegedly insults.
And furthermore, note that VVOV confirms that the Spanish pronunciation gets used in English by bilingual speakers in Los Angeles.
Terry K. said,
March 8, 2022 @ 8:57 am
Ooop, that first ? should be a period. I was getting ahead of myself thinking of the question to follow. And "existed" should be "existence". I clearly failed to proofread.
RP said,
March 8, 2022 @ 10:21 am
@Jongseong Park,
Thank you for the response and the insights.
I guess it seems odd to me that if so many Ukrainians are native Russian speakers, and if Kiev is traditionally a mostly Russian-speaking city, Ukrainians should try to insist nevertheless that the Russian-like name isn't used in English. I don't think the lack of hostility towards Ukrainian on the part of the Russian speakers quite explains this anomaly.
Someone mentioned Odessa earlier – the Guardian at least does prefer to spell it Odesa.
In France, in case this hasn't been mentioned (I read through the thread yesterday but might have missed something), Libération has recently switched to "Kyiv", while Le Monde has said that its editors have an ongoing debate among themselves about whether to do so.
RP said,
March 8, 2022 @ 10:24 am
Interesting detail about Kharkiv too, thanks.
The use of Kharkiv as the English name seems to have become dominant much earlier than Kyiv.
Jongseong Park said,
March 8, 2022 @ 12:46 pm
@Andrew Usher: Is that Korean something like /ki.u/ ?
No, 키이우 Kiiu is /kʰi.i.u/, three syllables. We insert the syllable break where Ukrainian does, between и and ї. Since we don't have a /u̯/ offglide in Korean we have it as a separate syllable.
Merriam-Webster does something similar when it gives \ˈki-yē-ü\ as a possible pronunciation for Kyiv. The audio recording makes the final syllable into more of an offglide than its own syllable though. Interestingly, I could swera that just a few days ago this was given as the first pronunciation, but currently \ˈkēv\ is the first pronunciation listed.
Of course the English in Ireland comparison is an exaggeration, but the point is that the Russian language is alive and well in Ukraine and not in danger of disappearing unlike, say, Rumeika (Crimean Greek). English in Malaysia or French in Algeria might be a better comparison.
@RP, most Ukrainians understand both Ukrainian and Russian and many speak both, including mixtures of the two languages (not to mention all the other minority languages). Determining who is a Russian speaker depends on how you word the question—whether it is about the native language, language used at home, at work, in formal situations, etc. There's a gradient as to which language is more spoken in which region, but no sharp boundaries anywhere. Another complication is that cities have traditionally been more Russian-speaking in the areas that used to be part of the Russian Empire but the surrounding countrysides were always more Ukrainian-speaking. So it is not like Belgium or Canada—you can't split the country into Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking parts. Nor can you split the population neatly into Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers, despite what a lot of superficial commentary about the country will tell you.
So basing the choice of language for place names on what language is used more locally is not as straightforward as one might think. It is as much for reasons of administrative convenience as for symbolic, nationalistic reasons that the way the Ukrainian government writes place names in English is based on the Ukrainian form. And citizens of Kyiv who are used to seeing and using the official English name of the city at home can find it a mild inconvenience when outsiders insist on using another name. We language lovers might delight in the proliferation of different names in different languages, but Ukrainians having to explain that Kiev and Kyiv refer to the same place to clueless bureaucrats in other countries might not be so enthusiastic.
English is the de facto world auxiliary language and what people often forget in these kinds of debate is that the people requesting the use of the name are users of English as well. Ukrainians often need to give addresses and otherwise refer to the names of places in English. That is why they insist on using Kyiv in English but (at least for the most part) are not as bothered by other major languages like French and German who have their own traditional names.
Kiev and Odessa are the only traditional city names in English that I can think of that stuck around after the official romanizations of Ukrainian place names came out in 1995, unless we count Chernobyl. We don't see Sebastopol anymore but Sevastopol, for instance.
Philip Taylor said,
March 8, 2022 @ 3:01 pm
"We don't see Sebastopol anymore but Sevastopol, for instance." — That is a very recent change, if Google ngrams are to be believed. I for one was unaware that Sevastopol was even attested until you mentioned it; I have only ever heard of it (in reality, read of it) as Sebastopol, and that almost entirely in the context of the Siege of Sebastopol (1854–1855)
Pete Tsayolo said,
March 8, 2022 @ 4:02 pm
I wrote "But where does the German -e [in 'Ukraine'] come from?" above, but then I realized Russian is a more obvious candidate than Yiddish for the -e [ə]. So perhaps German 'Ukraine' was modeled on actual Russian pronunciation rather than on any spelling?
Michael Watts said,
March 8, 2022 @ 7:38 pm
Sevastopol is an interesting case in that there does not appear to have been a phonetic [b] or an orthographic "b" involved in the name at any point. Spelling "Sebastopol" with a "b" can only be justified by reference to classical Greek, which would strongly suggest that the spelling should be "Sebastopolis".
Jongseong Park said,
March 8, 2022 @ 7:47 pm
@Philip Taylor,
At least Sevastopol has overtaken Sebastopol there, but Google ngrams still show Kharkov as more popular than Kharkiv.
I think it has to do with the fact that the cities are likely to appear in English-language books in connection to historical events like the Siege of Sebastopol and the Battle(s) of Kharkov, where the traditional names are fossilized. In reference to the present-day cities, at least since the mid 2000s when I started paying attention, Sevastopol and Kharkiv have been the usual forms and the occasional use of traditional names come across as quaint to me. But at least before the recent events, most English speakers are not likely to have come across the names of Ukrainian cities very frequently, so forms like Kharkiv and Sevastopol are probably familiar only to a smaller group of people who are more interested in Ukraine than average.
So it depends on whether you are more familiar with the places from history or from more recent reporting. Similarly, some people might be familiar with the landing at Inchon during the Korean War, while others might be more familiar with Incheon International Airport.
Jongseong Park said,
March 8, 2022 @ 9:39 pm
On the subject of the pronunciation of the final sound in Kyiv/Kiev, while the standard pronunciations as taught to learners of the language would be [ˈkɪjiu̯] for Ukrainian Київ and [ˈkʲijɪf] for Russian Киев, there is wide variation in the realization of в in both languages. Languagehat said that there is no single pronunciation of Ukrainian; the same holds true for Russian where more vocalic pronunciations of в as [w] or [u̯] are features associated with Southern Russian dialects.
In Korean, these more vocalic allophones of в in Russian are reflected in the earliest borrowings. While both Koreas have official rules for transcribing Russian, they both include exceptions to the rules to defer to traditional usage. Правда (Pravda) is written 프라우다 Peurauda instead of the regular 프라브다 Peurabeuda in South Korea and 쁘라우다 Ppeurauda instead of the regular 쁘라브다 Ppeurabeuda in North Korea. In North Korea, Russian Владимир (Vladimir) is written 울라지미르 Ulajimireu instead of the regular 블라지미르 Beulajimir (cf. 블라디미르 Beuladimir in South Korea).
Russian as spoken in Ukraine would probably be closer to the Southern Russian dialects. Also keep in mind that most Ukrainians are bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian to some extent, and their phonologies can influence each other in addition to the dialectal variations within the languages themselves.
Speaking of allophones of в, Rusyn which is spoken in the Carpathian region and is sometimes regarded as a dialect of Ukrainian (especially in Ukraine) has an interesting, Slovak-like distribution where в is vocalized to [u̯] at the end of a syllable like standard Ukrainian in cases like правда (pravda) but is [f] in words like вчора (vchora) in a syllable-initial cluster where the following consonant is voiceless. I understand that a similar pattern holds in nearby southwestern Ukrainian dialects.